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An advanced relationship is a way to represent all the various inter-relationships between entities, as well as relationships from entities to information and resources found outside of the MusicBrainz database.

All of this information is stored in a single table in the database, and there is a single user interface for adding new information. In this way, MusicBrainz has a fairly simple way to deal with extremely complicated data.

These Advanced Relationship Types are themselves simply entries in another database table. This means that new ones can be defined, old ones deleted, and existing ones modified through a relatively simple user-interface which does not require hacking the database internals. Since this data is much more important than any other individual entries, editing of Advanced Relationship Types is limited to selected users, called Relationship Editors. There are more relationship editors than developers, and the process of adding a new relationship type is much simpler than adding a new database table, so this is a very fast way to expand and improve the MusicBrainz Database.

A list of all of the relationship types defined so far is kept at Advanced Relationship Types. That page also links to documentation for each individual type.